Off Lighting/Color With 7D

[marekjoz]

Color will vary slightly from camera to camera and scene to scene, especially depending what you have your saturation ratings at and such. Even professionals have a tough time with color at time. If you really want to nail color, you could carry and expo disc, shove it on your lens before shooting in a scene, run a quick custom white balance and you're good to go until you change scenes/lighting/etc... Basically your camera is trying to figure out in your scene what 18% gray is, and if it cant figure it out, it will do it's best guess. Even us professionals carry gray cards with us, or expodiscs, or gray discs, whatever that we could shove in front of the camera before shooting a series of shots. If you're more of an auto color guy, you can keep it on AWB and pray it works well or try to best match your scene such as cloudy, flash, tungsten, etc... Also making sure you nail exposure could depend on color fidelity, richness, and consistency.

Although I find it more convenient to search on the scene anything white and later in PP adjust WB to this sample. Everything with WB works until there are consistent light sources (remember my adventures on the snow in the evening )

 

[awinphoto]

Color will vary slightly from camera to camera and scene to scene, especially depending what you have your saturation ratings at and such. Even professionals have a tough time with color at time. If you really want to nail color, you could carry and expo disc, shove it on your lens before shooting in a scene, run a quick custom white balance and you're good to go until you change scenes/lighting/etc... Basically your camera is trying to figure out in your scene what 18% gray is, and if it cant figure it out, it will do it's best guess. Even us professionals carry gray cards with us, or expodiscs, or gray discs, whatever that we could shove in front of the camera before shooting a series of shots. If you're more of an auto color guy, you can keep it on AWB and pray it works well or try to best match your scene such as cloudy, flash, tungsten, etc... Also making sure you nail exposure could depend on color fidelity, richness, and consistency.

Although I find it more convenient to search on the scene anything white and later in PP adjust WB to this sample. Everything with WB works until there are consistent light sources (remember my adventures on the snow in the evening )

I used to shoot like that for the longest time... and it worked well 90% of the time. In the end, i learned to really nail custom white balance as much in camera and it cuts my post production time dramatically. I still do heavy photoshop work when i find a photo i really think will sell well, but color balance is one thing i dont have to worry about.

 

[wickidwombat]

I tried that process i posted last night

my thoughts
the screen is still way too oversaturated for my liking I think this is why your images look duller because you are editing on an oversaturated monitor
when i did this calibration then view your images they all looked good

however I feel my monitor is too saturated I think tonight i might redo it but drop the red and blue channel gamma down further than the recomended 98%

I also feel that in the calibration section maybe trying a gamma of something different to 2.2 or 2.15 will be beneficial and might boost contrast. will need some trial and error here.

I also think I will redo with lower initial brightness as I keep my editing room quite dark.

Once I've had another go at this i'll post some more feedback.
I dont want to spend $200 on calibration gizmo that wont work properly

 

[AprilForever]

With pictures 1, 2, 3, and the last one, the subjects are light poorly. try shooting with your subject not backlight. Try shooting at either earlier or later in the day. Get the sun shining on your object; point your shadow at the subject to know if it is light well.

What does subject not backlight mean?

Also I can't really control the time of day in those pictures, unfortunately.

7 is a dull picture because there is no clear purpose to the image; when everything is on focus, nothing is in focus. You need the background to provide the eye a visual cue that there is depth to the scene. Use the 50 1.4 @ 1.4 as much as possible. It will help you develop this vision.

The purpose of 7 is to show what is there, I did not want anything blurred out for depth of field. Good tip, though.

#8 isn't bad, but would be better if the foreground were either black or lighter.

#9 would be better with a better foreground.

#10 would be better if you had pointed the camera toward the ground a little more...

Hope this helps! What makes a good picture is not high saturation as much as it is subtle details as listed above; keep working at it! You are getting there!!!

Very helpful!
Thanks.

Backlighting is when the light is coming from the back of your subject. If you expose for the entire frame, the subject will be dark. This can work well, if you desire to make a silhouette. Or, if you expose for your subject, you can make the entire background fade into white. Either can work, but an underexposed subject which is not black doesn't usually work.

Hope that helps!

 

[wickidwombat]

i've redone the calibration i posted a couple more times this time i set the brightness down to 60% before doing the calibration and only put it back up to 90% after
I found going below 98% blue and red gamma gave wierd colour casts
my lightroom and photoshop look good now but safari and firefox colours are still out of whack (too saturated)
oh well as long as the editing software is working properly